As known, patients that are affected by a neurodegenerative disease, such as, for instance, the Parkinson's disease, or, generally, patients experiencing motor and cognitive deficiencies spend typically long periods of time (weeks, months, years) for rehabilitation, in order to improve/recover their motor and cognitive functionalities. Often, rehabilitation may require multiple training sessions during the day.
Methods for the rehabilitation of patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases are known. Moreover, methods for rehabilitation are known which allow patients to perform training exercises at their home under the control of a therapist who interacts with the patient remotely. The therapist may remotely choose the exercises and/or the level of difficulty of the training session to be performed by the patient according to an evaluation of the patient's conditions. These methods allow reducing the workload of the therapist and the stress level of the patients, who are not forced to continually move from their house to a rehabilitation center. Moreover, the patients can be trained with exercises that are adapted to their conditions and this allows avoiding that the patients get frustrated by excessively difficult exercises or get bored by excessively easy exercises.
Moreover, rehabilitation methods are known that make use of games and videogames which typically are ad-hoc designed. These methods advantageously allow not to lose the interest and participation of the patient for rehabilitation over long periods of time.
US 2002/0146672 A1 discloses a method and system for individually exercising one or more parameters of hand movement such as range, speed, fractionation and strength in a virtual reality environment and for providing performance-based interaction with the user to increase user motivation while exercising. This method and system can be used for rehabilitation of neuromotor disorders, such as a stroke. A first input device senses position of digits of the hand of the user while the user is performing an exercise by interacting with a virtual image. A second input device provides force feedback to the user and measures position of the digits of the hand while the user is performing an exercise by interacting with a virtual image. The virtual images are updated based on targets determined for the user's performance in order to provide harder or easier exercises.
WO 2012/139868 discloses a system and methods to perform rehabilitation or physical therapy exercise while doing specifically designed video-games with the support of a therapist. Patient plays said video-games with external controllers with motion sensors connected to a PC or a laptop. The therapist can influence a gaming session of the patient by setting on a shared web-service thresholds for the patient. Said settings are gathered before starting a gaming session and patient movements are filtered by said settings to control the video-game. The patient is then limited in the movements by the feedbacks provided by the audio-visual interface of the video-game: movements on the screen are a result of the real movement done by the patient with said motion sensors filtered by the settings imposed by the therapist on the shared web space. On the other side, a patient with problems in doing some movements, can effectively play a video-game thanks to filtering imposed by the therapist. Information about the game played, and consequently about movements performed, are finally uploaded on the web-service for further analysis by the therapist.